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The beach between Slea Head and Dunmore Head on the Dingle Peninsula, Ireland, a location where scenes for Ryan's Daughter were filmed.

In August 1917, Rosy Ryan, only daughter of the local publican, widower Tom Ryan, is bored with life in Kirrary, an isolated village on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, Ireland. The villagers are nationalists, taunting British soldiers from a nearby army camp. Tom Ryan publicly supports the recently suppressed Easter Rising, but secretly serves the British as an informer.

Rosy falls in love with the village schoolmaster, widower Charles Shaughnessy. She imagines, though he tries to convince her otherwise, that he will somehow add excitement to her life. They marry and settle in the schoolhouse, but he is a quiet man uninterested in physical love.

Major Randolph Doryan arrives in October 1917 to take command of the army camp. After winning a Victoria Cross on the Western Front, he has a crippled leg and is suffering from shell shock. When he visits the pub where Rosy is serving alone, he collapses under a flashback to the trenches and is comforted by her. The two kiss passionately until they are interrupted by the arrival of Ryan and others. Next day, the two ride to a forest for a passionate liaison. Charles becomes suspicious of Rosy, but keeps his thoughts to himself.

Charles takes his schoolchildren to the beach, where he notices Doryan's telltale footprints accompanied by a woman's in the sand. He tracks the prints to a cave and imagines Doryan and Rosy conducting an affair. Local halfwit Michael notices the footprints as well and searches the cave. Finding a button from Doryan's uniform, he pins it on his lapel and proudly parades through the village, but suffers abuse from the villagers. When Rosy comes riding past, Michael approaches her tenderly. Between Rosy's dismay and Michael's pantomime, the villagers surmise that she is having an affair with Doryan.

One night in January 1918, during a fierce storm, IRB leader Tim O'Leary – who had killed a police constable earlier – and a small band of his men arrive in Ryan's pub seeking help to recover a shipment of German arms being floated from a ship towards the beach. When they leave, Ryan tips off the British. The entire village turns out to help the rebels, with Ryan the most outwardly devoted to the task, wading into the breakers repeatedly to salvage boxes of weapons and explosives. O'Leary is overwhelmed by Ryan's devotion, and the villagers are ebullient. They gleefully free the rebels' loaded truck from the wet sand and follow it up the hill. Doryan, waiting at the top with his troops, captures the men and arms. O'Leary makes a break, but Doryan climbs atop the truck and brings him down with a single rifle shot. Then he suffers a flashback and collapses. Rosy presses through the crowd in concern, outraging the villagers.

Charles tells Rosy that he had let her affair run its course, hoping that the infatuation would pass, but now wants a separation. Rosy says the affair is over, but that night she leaves their bed in her nightdress to meet Doryan. In dismay, Charles wanders in his nightclothes to the beach, where the parish priest Father Collins finds him. The villagers storm into the schoolhouse and seize Rosy, convinced that she informed the British of the arms shipment. Ryan watches in shame and horror as his daughter takes the blame for his actions. The mob shears off her hair and strips off her clothes.

Doryan walks along the beach and gives his cigarette case to Michael. In gratitude, Michael leads Doryan to a cache of arms, including dynamite, that was not recovered. After Michael runs off, Doryan commits suicide by detonating the explosives. The next day, Rosy and Charles leave for Dublin, enduring the taunts of the villagers as they go.

Robert Bolt's original idea was to make a film of Madame Bovary, starring Miles. Lean read the script and said that he did not find it interesting, but suggested to Bolt that he would like to rework it into another setting. The film still retains parallels with Flaubert's novel – Rosy parallels Emma Bovary, Charles is her husband, Major Doryan is analogous to Rodolphe and Leon, Emma's lovers.

Reportedly, Mitchum initially was reluctant to take the role. While he admired the script, he was undergoing a personal crisis at the time and when pressed by Lean as to why he wouldn't be available for filming, told him "I was actually planning on committing suicide." Upon hearing of this, scriptwriter Bolt told him, "Well, if you just finish working on this wretched little film and then do yourself in, I'd be happy to stand the expenses of your burial."[citation needed]

The role of Major Doryan was written for Marlon Brando, who initially accepted, but problems with the production of Burn! forced him to drop out. Peter O'Toole, Richard Harris and Richard Burton also were considered. Lean then saw Christopher Jones in The Looking Glass War (1969) and decided he had to have Jones for the part, and so cast him without ever meeting him. He thought Chris had that rare Brando/Dean quality he wanted on film.

Mitchum clashed with Lean, saying that "[W]orking with David Lean is like constructing the Taj Mahal out of toothpicks"; despite this, Mitchum confided to friends and family that he felt Ryan's Daughter was among his best roles and he regretted the negative response the film received. In a radio interview, Mitchum claimed (despite the difficult production) Lean was one of the best directors he'd worked with.[9]

Jones claimed to have had an affair with Sharon Tate, who was killed by Charles Manson and his followers during filming, which devastated Jones. Miles and Jones also grew to dislike one another, leading to trouble when filming the love scenes. Christopher was engaged to Olivia Hussey, and he was not attracted to Miles. He even refused to do the forest love scene with her, which prompted Miles to conspire with Mitchum. It was Mitchum who settled on the idea of drugging Jones by sprinkling an unspecified substance on his cereal. Mitchum overdosed Jones, however, and the actor was nearly catatonic during the love scene.[10]

Jones and Lean clashed frequently.[citation needed] Because Lean thought that Jones' voice was too flat to be compelling, he decided to have all of Jones' lines overdubbed by Julian Holloway. Lean was not alone in his disappointment with the actor. Jones' retirement from acting was purportedly due to the bad reviews he received for Ryan's Daughter.[11]

The Motion Picture Association of America originally gave Ryan's Daughter an "R" rating. A nude scene between Miles and Jones, as well as its themes involving infidelity, were the primary reasons for the decision.[12] At the time, MGM was having financial trouble and appealed the rating not due to artistic but financial reasons.

At the appeal hearing, MGM executives explained that they needed the less restrictive rating to allow more audience into the theatres; otherwise the company would not be able to survive financially. The appeal was overturned and the film received a "GP" rating, which later became "PG". Jack Valenti considered this to be one of the tarnishing marks on the rating system.[13] When MGM resubmitted the film to the MPAA in 1996, it was re-rated "R."[14]

In Australia and New Zealand, the film was initially rated PG, but is currently rated M.

Some attribute the negative reviews to critics' expectations being too high, following the three epics Lean had directed in a row before Ryan's Daughter. The preview cut ran for over 220 minutes and was criticised for its length and poor pacing. Lean felt obliged to remove up to 17 minutes of footage before the film's wide release. The missing footage has not been restored or located. Lean took these criticisms very personally, claiming at the time that he would never make another film.[citation needed] (Others dispute this, citing the fact that Lean tried but was unable to get several projects off the ground, including The Bounty.) The film was moderately successful worldwide at the box office and was one of the most successful films of 1970 in Britain, where it ran at a West End theatre for almost two years straight.

The film was also criticized for its perceived depiction of the Irish proletariat as uncivilized. An Irish commentator in 2008 called them "the local herd-like and libidinous populace who lack gainful employment to keep them occupied".[17] Some criticised the film as an attempt to blacken the legacy of the 1916 Easter Rising and the subsequent Irish War of Independence in relation to the eruption of "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland around the time of the film's release. Since the film's release on DVD, Ryan's Daughter has been reconsidered by some critics; it has been called an overlooked masterpiece, countering many of the criticisms such as its alleged "excessive scale". Other elements, like John Mills' caricature of 'the village idiot' (an Oscar-winning performance), have been met with ambivalence.[18]